It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on Twitter?" It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech?"
But I don't think even _that's_ the right question. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have built so much trust in algorithm and API and machine learning, and no one stopped to ask how careful they needed to be with turning over so much power to a computer program that can and will be gamed by malicious actors. Hate speech and conspiracy theories and fraud can now be amplified a millionfold, and the vehicles by which it's happening were not prepared to deal with the implications. And they continue to double-down on the "more machine learning will fix it" self-delusion.
It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on Twitter?"
No, it’s 100% about this. You do know that violent crime is at an all time low, right (at least in the US)? There is no problem other than the audience for technology is using it in a way not approved of by some if its creators (the OP, not me for instance).
If you’re not unhappy with the state of the industry, these think pieces lamenting it read as really self-centered and out of touch.
While crime over all and violent crime remain well below their levels of the 1980s and 1990s, last year was the first time violent crime increased in consecutive years since 2005 and 2006
I agree that this article sounds totally out of touch with reality. I think the author doesn't really believe what he's saying, he's just trying (and failing) to be a hipster to the rest of the tech industry and has attached a virtuous cause to justify it to himself
I'm afraid I suspect that it's revealing a bunch of latent biases as the web has grown to reach people from different socio-economic layers and cultural milieus. These people were always there; we just didn't hear them, because we had a pyramidal media structure controlled by elites.
One theory I've heard is that the nation state is over, and the Internet killed it. Demos, the shared group of people that makes up a voting democracy and validates democratic choice as a group will, is breaking down. People are starting to identity at global levels by social class, education and political outlook, rather than national identity. People no longer participate in the same national narrative. I think this would have happened eventually if we only had newsgroups and chain emails, it's just happened faster because we have easier to use software.
I don't think some unholy union of state and corporate control of free speech is the answer. If anything, it's a path to civil war, eventually.
It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech?"
And once you've made the jump from "speech should be free" to "speech (that I condone) should be free", you've made a big step towards fascism.
Somewhere between all possible speech, ever, should be free, and, well, fascism, is a more nuanced and useful classification of speech than "condone: yes/no".
A thorough and well thought out treatise on why the Holocaust didn't actually happen, exists in a different class of objectionable compared to a single anti-semitic tweet, which is different to credible threats of bodily harm or death against a specific individual (including street address and phone number). Different still is claims that the Earth is flat or 6000 years old.
Expressing like or dislike of current political leaders belongs to yet another class, and the various different kinds of sales pitches could be divided into a few more, as well.
For sure. But trying to get privately owned companies to clamp down on free speech isn't going to fix the underlying issue; if that worked, sooner or later you'll create a market for fringe right-wing / left-wing social networks and messaging platforms that are even more of an echo chamber, and some people will start agitating for state control over permitted corporate platforms for speech - and that really will be fascism.
we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech
We thought people were better, that with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government put on our heads. We never imagined people would deliberately poison our watering hole.
I really wish people would stop using the term “we”. There is no “we” here. The 20th century had both world wars, Vietnam and a host of major atrocities. I’d say people who “thought people were better” were actually in the minority. Most haven’t forgotten what people are capable of and realize the shouting matches on the internet are really no big deal in the grand scheme of things.
with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government
It seems like this is happening. It’s just not aligning with the politics of those in power. Neither the government nor mass media wanted Trump to get elected yet it happened anyway, for instance.
There’s great irony in complaining about Trump’s lack of truth then in the same breath blaming “malicious actors”. The truth is that Trump gave a voice to a large group of people that the media and other establishment didn’t want voiced. And now he’s president. I don’t know if that could have happened without the internet but I doubt it.
I see Trump as the Internet’s first president. Every other avenue was strongly against him but ultimately couldn’t shout down the “truth” of his popularity because he had internet based communication channels that mass media didn’t control.
Structurally speaking, Trump was a major victory for alternatives to mainstream media and politics. That’s why the defeated parties are desperately grasping at the “malicious actors” fabrications. They can’t handle the loss of control.
>how much real-world badness has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically
This is just the age old question of free will. Everyone could be locked in a metal cage and there would be no murder but would this be the best state for humanity? You have to take the good with the bad...
The difference is that when you’re in the middle cage you’re near the other people acting on you.
The Internet has made it trivial for people to cause damage, possibly serious damage (SWATting and other such things) to people large distances away where it’s nearly impossible to figure out who was actually behind it.
All existing message we had to deal with people seem to fail to deal with these issues, but no one ever took that into account. They just pushed ahead assuming that either it wouldn’t be a problem or eventually the laws would “fix” the issues. But in the time between serious damage is being done to people/companies/governments.
I think these are all very good questions for people to ask themselves. I don’t think he’s arguing that technology is bad or that we should’ve all run away from it. But I think the happy unicorn “everything is better with technology“ view that many people seem to blindly apply to large social change may not be a good idea.
To take one example, harassment is not a new thing on Twitter. Harassment on social forums has existed as long as social forums have existed on computers. Same with many of the issues Reddit faces.
But no one seems to of looked into the lessons of how people trying to deal with it on BBSs, USENET, and other places. “We can just think about that later“ where later is defined as some number billion users.
The Internet has made it trivial for people to cause damage
It amazes me that nobody seems to take much of an issue with that. We've seen several instances of people having their lives ruined and/or killing themselves because of things that happened on the internet just this year alone. Whenever I bring any of these up, it's met with indifference, as if that's just the price we pay for the internet. It's really concerning that people just accept all of this online suffering as a necessary evil, like it's just something that comes with society being able to use the internet.
like it's just something that comes with society being able to use the internet.
That's exactly what it is. Whether or not we as a society decide that cost is worth paying is another matter, but yes, the price we pay for the internet is that it acts as a force multiplier for all collective human intent, good and evil. And let's be fair - as much as we're focusing in this thread on the harm the internet has done, I don't think that harm outweighs the benefit to society.
but yes, the price we pay for the internet is that it acts as a force multiplier for all collective human intent, good and evil
I disagree, I think that we can (and should) do everything we can to mitigate that evil. If Tumblr and Twitter didn't half-ass their ToS, we wouldn't have kids killing themselves because they got doxed and sent death threats. Websites don't need to be complete anarchist societies; I think many social media sites are morally obligated to follow up on their ToS and not just let everything go to shit because their AI thought what is clearly a credible terrorist threat is perfectly fine (this has actually happened to me on Facebook).
We have platforms where people can cause harm, but we also have the ability to properly moderate these platforms, the internet doesn't just have to be a bunch of thinly veiled 4chan-esque shitholes, we have the responsibility to make sure these extremely popular platforms aren't just letting people ruin each other's lives.
Websites don't need to be complete anarchist societies; I think many social media sites are morally obligated to follow up on their ToS and not just let everything go to shit because their AI thought what is clearly a credible terrorist threat is perfectly fine (this has actually happened to me on Facebook).
That's true, and individual sites have the right to enforce whatever rules they like, but that doesn't extend to the platform as a whole, because the internet can't be made to conform to any specific moral or legal ideal. Wherever you have freedom of speech and freedom to communicate, you also have freedom to conspire. And, as connections on the internet are necessarily nonlocal, someone without an account on a heavily moderated platform can still threaten you depending on the information you leave publicly available.
It was once said that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. This turns out not to be as true as once assumed, because of the network effect of social media sites, but it is still true enough, where "censorship" is considered as a politically, socially and morally agnostic term. Push the racists and trolls off of Twitter, they'll just go somewhere else. That's intended to be a feature, but only because it applies to everyone.
Within a month or so of signing up with Twitter I got to watch someone I followed live tweet themselves running from their house as someone else was live tweeting that they were coming to attack/kill them.
Because the person I followed tweeted a joke.
That was YEARS ago. Obviously it’s left and indelible mark on how I think about these things.
I’m with you. It continues to amaze me that people seem to see this stuff as acceptable status quo. I don’t know if it’s because they were in a group that isn’t being attacked, or they haven’t had friends attacked, or they think they’re safer whatever reason.
What goes on… just the worst of it not even the ‘basic’ racist insults and such… is rather horrifying.
But in even the most obvious cases Twitter and others refuse to do anything. I’d say the courts are our only hope but I don’t see them being able to catch up. By the time you track someone down and prosecute them it’s been far too many years and the problematic behaviors have continued from that person and others.
Two months form now will mark 4 years since I received hundreds of death threats because of a dumb edgy tumblr post.
Some of the "safest" sites really are incredibly dangerous in ways people think only apply to things on the dark net. The internet is an absolute nightmare in an incredible state of disarray. Social media giants use horrible tactics to create addictions, and then let their sites turn into anarchy because they don't moderate anything. The internet's interactivity really is awful sometimes, I've moved to just passive consumption of content, I won't even use certain sites without being behind Tor or a proxy.
It does feel a lot like a Pandora’s box.
I feel like it's worse. Pandora's box was filled with nothing but evil, but the internet didn't start that way, we just let it get like this because nobody cared enough to stop it. To me, that's a lot more upsetting than something that was evil from the start.
Comments
It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on Twitter?" It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech?"
But I don't think even _that's_ the right question. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have built so much trust in algorithm and API and machine learning, and no one stopped to ask how careful they needed to be with turning over so much power to a computer program that can and will be gamed by malicious actors. Hate speech and conspiracy theories and fraud can now be amplified a millionfold, and the vehicles by which it's happening were not prepared to deal with the implications. And they continue to double-down on the "more machine learning will fix it" self-delusion.
No, it’s 100% about this. You do know that violent crime is at an all time low, right (at least in the US)? There is no problem other than the audience for technology is using it in a way not approved of by some if its creators (the OP, not me for instance).
If you’re not unhappy with the state of the industry, these think pieces lamenting it read as really self-centered and out of touch.
This is incorrect, it's been rising the past couple years: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-c...
You forgot this part.
I agree that this article sounds totally out of touch with reality. I think the author doesn't really believe what he's saying, he's just trying (and failing) to be a hipster to the rest of the tech industry and has attached a virtuous cause to justify it to himself
I'm afraid I suspect that it's revealing a bunch of latent biases as the web has grown to reach people from different socio-economic layers and cultural milieus. These people were always there; we just didn't hear them, because we had a pyramidal media structure controlled by elites.
One theory I've heard is that the nation state is over, and the Internet killed it. Demos, the shared group of people that makes up a voting democracy and validates democratic choice as a group will, is breaking down. People are starting to identity at global levels by social class, education and political outlook, rather than national identity. People no longer participate in the same national narrative. I think this would have happened eventually if we only had newsgroups and chain emails, it's just happened faster because we have easier to use software.
I don't think some unholy union of state and corporate control of free speech is the answer. If anything, it's a path to civil war, eventually.
And once you've made the jump from "speech should be free" to "speech (that I condone) should be free", you've made a big step towards fascism.
Somewhere between all possible speech, ever, should be free, and, well, fascism, is a more nuanced and useful classification of speech than "condone: yes/no".
A thorough and well thought out treatise on why the Holocaust didn't actually happen, exists in a different class of objectionable compared to a single anti-semitic tweet, which is different to credible threats of bodily harm or death against a specific individual (including street address and phone number). Different still is claims that the Earth is flat or 6000 years old.
Expressing like or dislike of current political leaders belongs to yet another class, and the various different kinds of sales pitches could be divided into a few more, as well.
Free speech has no requirement that privately owned companies must promote your speech to a mass audience.
For sure. But trying to get privately owned companies to clamp down on free speech isn't going to fix the underlying issue; if that worked, sooner or later you'll create a market for fringe right-wing / left-wing social networks and messaging platforms that are even more of an echo chamber, and some people will start agitating for state control over permitted corporate platforms for speech - and that really will be fascism.
However, it does have a requirement that there are large public spaces available to masses to practice free speech.
Another important note is that promotion is hardly the same as allowing.
We thought people were better, that with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government put on our heads. We never imagined people would deliberately poison our watering hole.
I really wish people would stop using the term “we”. There is no “we” here. The 20th century had both world wars, Vietnam and a host of major atrocities. I’d say people who “thought people were better” were actually in the minority. Most haven’t forgotten what people are capable of and realize the shouting matches on the internet are really no big deal in the grand scheme of things.
It seems like this is happening. It’s just not aligning with the politics of those in power. Neither the government nor mass media wanted Trump to get elected yet it happened anyway, for instance.
His election was the opposite of truth and debate flowing freely and a textbook example of malicious actors poisoning the watering hole.
There’s great irony in complaining about Trump’s lack of truth then in the same breath blaming “malicious actors”. The truth is that Trump gave a voice to a large group of people that the media and other establishment didn’t want voiced. And now he’s president. I don’t know if that could have happened without the internet but I doubt it.
I see Trump as the Internet’s first president. Every other avenue was strongly against him but ultimately couldn’t shout down the “truth” of his popularity because he had internet based communication channels that mass media didn’t control.
Structurally speaking, Trump was a major victory for alternatives to mainstream media and politics. That’s why the defeated parties are desperately grasping at the “malicious actors” fabrications. They can’t handle the loss of control.
This is just the age old question of free will. Everyone could be locked in a metal cage and there would be no murder but would this be the best state for humanity? You have to take the good with the bad...
The difference is that when you’re in the middle cage you’re near the other people acting on you.
The Internet has made it trivial for people to cause damage, possibly serious damage (SWATting and other such things) to people large distances away where it’s nearly impossible to figure out who was actually behind it.
All existing message we had to deal with people seem to fail to deal with these issues, but no one ever took that into account. They just pushed ahead assuming that either it wouldn’t be a problem or eventually the laws would “fix” the issues. But in the time between serious damage is being done to people/companies/governments.
I think these are all very good questions for people to ask themselves. I don’t think he’s arguing that technology is bad or that we should’ve all run away from it. But I think the happy unicorn “everything is better with technology“ view that many people seem to blindly apply to large social change may not be a good idea.
To take one example, harassment is not a new thing on Twitter. Harassment on social forums has existed as long as social forums have existed on computers. Same with many of the issues Reddit faces.
But no one seems to of looked into the lessons of how people trying to deal with it on BBSs, USENET, and other places. “We can just think about that later“ where later is defined as some number billion users.
But people got hurt in the meantime.
It amazes me that nobody seems to take much of an issue with that. We've seen several instances of people having their lives ruined and/or killing themselves because of things that happened on the internet just this year alone. Whenever I bring any of these up, it's met with indifference, as if that's just the price we pay for the internet. It's really concerning that people just accept all of this online suffering as a necessary evil, like it's just something that comes with society being able to use the internet.
That's exactly what it is. Whether or not we as a society decide that cost is worth paying is another matter, but yes, the price we pay for the internet is that it acts as a force multiplier for all collective human intent, good and evil. And let's be fair - as much as we're focusing in this thread on the harm the internet has done, I don't think that harm outweighs the benefit to society.
I disagree, I think that we can (and should) do everything we can to mitigate that evil. If Tumblr and Twitter didn't half-ass their ToS, we wouldn't have kids killing themselves because they got doxed and sent death threats. Websites don't need to be complete anarchist societies; I think many social media sites are morally obligated to follow up on their ToS and not just let everything go to shit because their AI thought what is clearly a credible terrorist threat is perfectly fine (this has actually happened to me on Facebook).
We have platforms where people can cause harm, but we also have the ability to properly moderate these platforms, the internet doesn't just have to be a bunch of thinly veiled 4chan-esque shitholes, we have the responsibility to make sure these extremely popular platforms aren't just letting people ruin each other's lives.
That's true, and individual sites have the right to enforce whatever rules they like, but that doesn't extend to the platform as a whole, because the internet can't be made to conform to any specific moral or legal ideal. Wherever you have freedom of speech and freedom to communicate, you also have freedom to conspire. And, as connections on the internet are necessarily nonlocal, someone without an account on a heavily moderated platform can still threaten you depending on the information you leave publicly available.
It was once said that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. This turns out not to be as true as once assumed, because of the network effect of social media sites, but it is still true enough, where "censorship" is considered as a politically, socially and morally agnostic term. Push the racists and trolls off of Twitter, they'll just go somewhere else. That's intended to be a feature, but only because it applies to everyone.
Within a month or so of signing up with Twitter I got to watch someone I followed live tweet themselves running from their house as someone else was live tweeting that they were coming to attack/kill them.
Because the person I followed tweeted a joke.
That was YEARS ago. Obviously it’s left and indelible mark on how I think about these things.
I’m with you. It continues to amaze me that people seem to see this stuff as acceptable status quo. I don’t know if it’s because they were in a group that isn’t being attacked, or they haven’t had friends attacked, or they think they’re safer whatever reason.
What goes on… just the worst of it not even the ‘basic’ racist insults and such… is rather horrifying.
But in even the most obvious cases Twitter and others refuse to do anything. I’d say the courts are our only hope but I don’t see them being able to catch up. By the time you track someone down and prosecute them it’s been far too many years and the problematic behaviors have continued from that person and others.
It does feel a lot like a Pandora’s box.
Two months form now will mark 4 years since I received hundreds of death threats because of a dumb edgy tumblr post.
Some of the "safest" sites really are incredibly dangerous in ways people think only apply to things on the dark net. The internet is an absolute nightmare in an incredible state of disarray. Social media giants use horrible tactics to create addictions, and then let their sites turn into anarchy because they don't moderate anything. The internet's interactivity really is awful sometimes, I've moved to just passive consumption of content, I won't even use certain sites without being behind Tor or a proxy.
I feel like it's worse. Pandora's box was filled with nothing but evil, but the internet didn't start that way, we just let it get like this because nobody cared enough to stop it. To me, that's a lot more upsetting than something that was evil from the start.
I meant it in a “it’s too late and we can’t go back“ way.
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that pandora’s box was meant to be evil and the Internet was meant to be neutral/good.
I agree with you.